Gokul Rajaram: belief

Transcript context

…It's absolutely my pleasure. You're on the boards of Coinbase and Pinterest. You're a really big deal at DoorDash. You're an even bigger deal at Caviar. You worked at Square, at Facebook, at Google. Plus, you're an incredibly prolific investor. I'd probably put you in the top 1% of investors based on what I've seen. And so I'm just curious, kind of just to set context, how did you get into tech and product originally? And then just like, what was your journey like to becoming this luminary of tech? First of all, let's start using the word luminary. I think it's people like Elon and Mark Andreessen's word luminaries, I think. I've just been lucky to work at good companies and observe the creation and growth of these companies. I'll give you an interesting story. Easily enough, I joined Google as a PM. After I applied to Cisco, this was in 2003, and I wanted to be a hardcore networking product manager in the layer three, layer two of networking. I was like, layer seven software is for wimps. I'm going to go hardcore. Cisco had a, in 2001, 2002, right after the bust, the first dot-com bust, then Cisco actually rescinded my offer. They made me an offer, they rescinded it. And then basically that's how I ended up at Google. It was my second choice after Cisco. So literally you can see some of these decisions, you're just saved from yourself. by extraneous event. Otherwise, I would have been in networking probably maybe still at Cisco. But at Google, I got put on something called syndication, which is taking Google search results and ads and then syndicating it to other properties like AOL back in the day, Yahoo, etc. And I was working on that product. And at about 6 p.m., we had offices then back then at Google, 2000 to 2003. People would go home and some people would stay back. I'd just walk around. And a few days from me, I basically found a group of engineers in an office and they were working on something. I was like, what are you working on? They said, well, Sergey Brin, the co-founder, had given them a project of essentially reversing what Google had done with search. You type in a phrase, set of keywords, and then Google identifies the web pages that are most relevant to that set of keywords. So we have an index that matches keywords individually. and web pages. So why don't we extract those keywords for any given web page and basically see if we can target ads based on that? So that seemed interesting. Google's AdWords product, which was search ads, had just started scaling up. And I was like, hey, do you have any PMs working with you? They said, no. Can I be your PM? They said, aren't you working on syndication? I said, yeah, but I can do this nights and weekends. So I basically became a part-time PM for them and helped them talk to customers, even did presentations with them. And while the my full-time job was this other thing. And essentially within three months, this thing grew big enough and fast enough and became a product that my boss saw this and she moved me over to full-time work on this. And that became Google AdSense. So a lesson for me, I've realized is that it's very important to do your core job really well at any company. But it's equally important to have curiosity and be open to serendipity. I think Zoom makes it harder, but it's very important to understand what else is going on at the company. What else people are working on? And just keep talking to people and build relationships with the company because it harder, but it's very important to understand what else is going on at the company. What else people are working on? And just keep talking to people and build relationships with the company because those are what will lead to the next set of opportunities. I think many opportunities don't come linearly. Just working in your job and making sure you get promoted. That's not how I think great careers are built. I think great careers are built by knowing a lot of people, doing great work so they know and want you on their teams and just waiting for serendipity and then seizing it and jumping. Another example is I had advised a company which was acquired by Square and the fundraisers were Google. And Jack, the CEO of Square, asked the founder, who's one of the best product people he knows, my name was mentioned. So then they reached out to me. And I would never have really, I mean, informal advising. I didn't have any equity or something in the company. I just helped them out because they reached out to me because it was a former colleague. And I said, sure, I'll help you out. And then that resulted in him saying good things about me. And that led to the inbound from Square. So I think you've got to prioritize this stuff. I mean, you've got to be careful it doesn't take up your life. I think it's very important to be curious and open to serendipity. I realize in today's world, there are lots of crazy serendipity things that happen. If you take inbound from smart people and you just chat with them and you help them out, paying it forward is the other thing. Paying it forward, and Lenny, you're a great example of this. You paid forward so much, your articles, the stuff you write. Good things happen in ways that you don't even realize. You've built up a reservoir of goodwill that comes back to help you in different ways.…

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